Just Hand Him a Test Tube and Tell Him He's Wonderful
by Lucillia
Summary: The Brigadier narrowed his choice of U.N.I.T. Scientific Advisor down to two candidates, both of whom worked at Cambridge. He picks one, and then the Doctor arrives, destroying Ian Chesterton's hopes for a reasonably quiet assignment when he finds himself stuck in the role of the Doctor's assistant instead. Barbara's surely laughing herself sick back at Cambridge.
1. Chapter 1

The choice was down to two scientists from Cambridge, Elizabeth Shaw and Ian Chesterton. Being a military man, the Brigadier was leaning slightly towards Ian who had served in the fifties. However, there was the small matter of Mr. Chesterton's questionable politics and the fact that both he and his wife had vanished on the same day as a student at the school they had been teaching at and returned two years later sans student. The Chestertons claimed that the girl's grandfather had taken her with him when he moved and that they'd been doing missionary work in Africa, but there had been several holes in their stories.

Because the girl's grandfather was gone and unable to confirm or deny that his grandchild was with him and because a letter that had indicated that the trip to Africa was something that had to be jumped on right at the moment Mr. Chesterton and the then Miss. Wright had vanished had been found shortly before the two had returned from their trip, the matter had mostly been dropped. If he brought Mr. Chesterton in as a scientific advisor however, a number of questions would be raised.

Liz Shaw's background on the other hand was impeccable, and her credentials included a medical degree and fluency in French on top of her scientific degrees. There should be absolutely no contest between the two even though Shaw was a woman, but still, that touch of the Sight that the Brigadier had supposedly inherited from his grandmother was telling him he should pick the Chesterton fellow.

Knowing he was probably going to get yelled at by his superiors who would likely accuse him of sexism, the Brigadier picked up the phone and made a call...

* * *

Ian sighed as the car that had picked him up at the station drove him to his destination. He hadn't planned on doing anymore military work after he'd done his national service, and had hoped to live a relatively quiet life teaching at Cambridge, but he'd been called in by some organization called U.N.I.T., and from the looks of things, he couldn't refuse.

Queen and Country and all that...

After being driven to what was undoubtedly a secret facility, he was introduced to the Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart who started nattering on about meteorites and alien invasions, two things he'd thought he was done with after that bizarre adventure with that young man who'd turned out to really be the Doctor who was apparently able to change his face shortly before he and Barbara had finally gotten married.

"You seem rather calm about all of this." the Brigadier said when he failed to call the man a crackpot or deride his story as being Science Fiction rather than Science Fact.

"You'd be amazed at what I've lived through." he replied with a slightly enigmatic smile. "You'd likely not believe it either."

"You'd be surprised." the Brigadier said with a smile of his own.

While he was looking over the scientific reports regarding the unusual meteor shower and a similar one that had taken place six months before that the Brigadier had supplied, the phone rang and after some words from the person on the other end of the line, the Brigadier caused all of his mental functions to come to a screeching halt when he softly exclaimed "A Police Box!".

"Not again!" he groaned when he finally regained his senses, just barely resisting the urge to slam his head against the Brigadier's desk.

Sure, he liked the Doctor and wouldn't mind a _short _emphasis on _short_ visit from the man, but he and Barbara had returned to their own time for a reason. They had wanted to live a quiet and relatively normal life where they weren't being arrested by aliens and sentenced to death or being kidnapped by historical figures and sold into slavery, both of which and more had happened while he and his now wife had been forced to travel with the Doctor.

"Tell me Mr. Chesterton," the Brigadier said, looking at him intently for the first time "Does the name the Doctor mean anything to you?"

"Yes." he moaned as he buried his face in his hands.


	2. Chapter 2

Throughout the ride to the hospital where they were keeping the "Civilian" who had been found lying next to an abandoned police box in the middle of a wood somewhere, Ian silently prayed that he would be able to survive whatever the Doctor had just gotten him tangled in and go home to Barbara. Whatever was going on was dangerous, otherwise the Doctor who never knew when to keep his nose out of things wouldn't have landed in the middle of it.

The Brigadier had asked him how he'd known the Doctor, and he'd replied with a distracted "We've met." as he wondered where the meteors could've come from, and whether they would be the source of the danger this time or whether it would be coming from whoever had taken the last batch. The Brigadier stopped asking, though it was clear that he'd only stopped asking for now since he was somewhat distracted himself, likely over the Doctor who had a rather nasty habit of dragging people along in his wake.

All too soon they were at the hospital where the Brigadier snapped at the reporters who had swarmed them the instant they'd arrived. After they'd escaped the camera and microphone wielding mob, they marched down the hall and practically stormed towards the room where the Doctor was being kept. Both he and the young soldier who accompanied the Brigadier protested when the Brigadier ordered the man to give the men guarding the TARDIS live ammunition, but for different reasons. He personally didn't approve of soldiers wandering around armed on British soil, and the young soldier clearly didn't know what was going on.

Eventually, they reached the hospital room whose whitewashed walls sharply contrasted with the dark wood paneling of the rest of the hospital. He could vaguely make out a tuft of grey sticking out of the bundle of yellow blanket that was on the room's sole occupied bed. A doctor of the medical variety stood and greeted them as they entered.

"Doctor Henderson, this is Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and..." the young soldier who'd been at the hospital and alerted the Brigadier to the presence of the TARDIS said.

"Ian Chesterton," he said, coming forward to introduce himself.

"How's your patient doctor, can we see him?" the Brigadier asked, immediately getting to the point, clearly anxious as he was to see whether or not the man man on the bed was the Doctor.

"Certainly." Doctor Henderson replied. "He isn't making much sense yet."

"Still unconscious, eh?" the Brigadier asked.

"Most of the time, he has brief moments of consciousness and then slips back again." Doctor Henderson replied.

"I wonder what he poked his nose into that would result in him actually having to go into a healing coma." he said, remembering the time the old Doctor had damn near gotten himself killed during one of the misadventures that they had found themselves in the middle of because the old man had wanted to go exploring and ended up sleeping for three days straight.

"A what?" both the Brigadier and Dr. Henderson asked.

"The Doctor does that sometimes." he replied with a shrug, deciding not to go into detail since the story would take a very long time to tell, and despite the fact that the Brigadier had clearly met the Doctor, he doubted the man would believe his story even though every word of it was true.

"You and I are going to have a long talk sometime in the near future Mr. Chesterton." the Brigadier said as he strode over towards the bed and turned over the sleeping Doctor who had yet again changed his face.

At least he thought it might be the Doctor. It was quite possible that it was someone else, probably some other poor sod that he'd conned into traveling with him since he apparently quit kidnapping people after what he'd done to him and Barbara. He'd mostly forgiven the Doctor for that, but there was still some resentment over what the Doctor had done, especially since his and Barbara's lives had been thrown into complete disarray when they'd returned and it had taken months to get things back into order.

"Something wrong Brigadier?" he asked when the man frowned upon turning the man on the bed over.

"I've never seen this man before in my entire life." the Brigadier replied.

"It still might be the Doctor." he replied. "He's changed his face before."

It was at that point that the slumbering patient awoke and looked up at them.

"Lethbridge-Stewart?" the man said with a frown. "My dear fellow, how nice to see you again. And...No, it couldn't be...Chesterfield?"

"Honestly," he moaned when he noticed the odd look that the Brigadier was giving him. "I traveled with him for two years and he still can't get my name right."

"Oh, yes, now I remember...Chatterson."

The two soldiers snickered loudly as the Doctor asked for a mirror, apparently having very recently changed his face and not had much of a chance to see it since he'd apparently only just escaped from whatever group of people he'd upset this time.

Barbara was going to laugh herself sick when he told her about this when he got home, Official Secrets Act or no.


	3. Chapter 3

"Start talking Mr. Chesterton." the Brigadier said after we'd snuck out the back in order to avoid the press.

"Back in 1963 Barbara and I were ordinary teachers at Coal Hill, and then one evening we decided to poke our noses into the business of a student of ours, one Susan Foreman. It turned out that Susan was an alien, and her grandfather was a paranoid old bastard who would rather kidnap us than risk us going to the authorities. Of course, Susan's threat to leave him and remain in the sixties may have played a large role in the kidnapping considering the fact that the Doctor hadn't made any actual moves to do anything to us until she did so." he started, remembering the incident and how the old man hadn't made any moves towards departing from their era until Susan had threatened to up and leave him.

Ironic really, considering the fact that it ended up being the Doctor who had left Susan behind in the end...Before Susan had threatened to leave, it had looked like he and Barbara might've been able to talk the Doctor into opening the door and letting them go despite the nasty trick he'd pulled electrifying the console.

"Kidnapping?!" the Brigadier exclaimed, yanking him out of his thoughts on what had been and what might've been.

"Admittedly, we did barge into his TARDIS uninvited, and he swore he quit kidnapping people the last time we saw him." he replied, knowing how bad that sounded. Admittedly, it had been a bad situation overall, and it could be argued by some that he and Barbara had been suffering from some sort of capture-bonding rather than true affection for the Doctor, but their journey had eventually ended and he and Barbara had gone home alive and whole despite the deadly peril they'd been in while they'd been away.

Admittedly a good portion of that peril had been because the Doctor hadn't known how to pilot his TARDIS, and hadn't known when to butt out of things that weren't his business, though he and Barbara had been guilty of the same on a couple of occasions. Almost everywhere they'd gone, one or more of them had ended up almost dying. He'd been sentenced to death, forced into gladiatorial combat, and sold into slavery. He'd been stabbed, shot at, and nearly ended up as a museum exhibit. Any number of horrific fates could've been his, and he'd only survived most of them by the skin of his teeth.

True, he'd seen some amazing things that no other human had or would ever lay their eyes on, done things that no other man would have the privilege of doing, but he'd had no say in it. He'd had little choice in the matter. If he had been given a choice, there was a possibility that he might've said yes, but he would never know if that was so.

"Kidnapping?!" the Brigadier exclaimed again, apparently stuck on that point.

"Admittedly, if what he told me shortly before my and Barbara's wedding was true, he was rather young at the time, and from a species that considered themselves to be the most superior in the universe. It was understandable that he didn't originally see taking us as all that much worse than someone driving off with a perfectly healthy chipmunk that had somehow ended up in their car, which is wrong in and of itself." he said.

"So he just..." the Brigadier started.

"Shut the doors and flew off with us, dragging us into more trouble than most people see in ten lifetimes before we commandeered a Dalek time-travel device and made our way back to our home and as close to our time as we could get, after which we ended up running into a much older version of the Doctor during an incident with the Tribe of Gum and some psychic metal." he finished. "After us, he started actually asking before flying off with someone new on board."

"You seem remarkably calm about it all." the Brigadier said, still stunned by the revelation, apparently having met an older and wiser and kinder Doctor prior to this incident.

"There's nothing that can be done about it now. I've had years to recover, and considering the fact that it was my and Barbara's kidnapping that had kept the Doctor from continuing to treat us like mildly interesting animals and tempered him to the point where he became a decent individual, the price was worth paying considering the possible consequences had it not happened and the old man continued on as he had been before he met us." he replied.

"The possible consequences?" the Brigadier said.

"The Doctor I first met would likely have let the world burn during the first invasion he ran across rather than helped out. He was actually fully willing to leave Barbara to the Daleks at one point." he replied honestly, remembering how the Doctor had been in the beginning, and how he had been willing to leave an injured man behind to die in order to save his own skin. Actually, the Doctor had nearly killed the man himself earlier that evening and would've if he hadn't stopped him.

"There seems to be a great deal about the Doctor that I don't know." the Brigadier said with a slight grimace.

"True, but you should keep the fact that he's changed since I first knew him and the fact that he's not a threat in mind when you deal with him. He's still the Doctor you knew, there's just more to his history than you'd known about. Barbara and I have mostly forgiven him, and if it weren't for him, it's possible that we wouldn't have married and had our son Johnny and Vicki would quite likely have continued living with a murderer until she became one of his victims." he said, idly wondering what the Doctor had been like when the Brigadier had encountered him. He'd apparently made quite an impression on the man, considering the fact that there had been concern in the Brigadier's eyes when they'd raced over to the hospital to see him earlier.

"I see..." the Brigadier finally said, as he turned to look out the window, not really looking at anything as he lost himself in his thoughts.

"The Doctor is a good man." he said as the radio crackled to life and the driver answered it. "The fact that he was a spoiled brat from an advanced society who sees us as primitives doesn't change that."


End file.
